Since we do have an election coming along here in far Amurikey, I do feel that as a responsible public intellectual I should make some kind of an endorsement.

First, I feel that before voting, it is absolutely essential that everyone read this essay, and then watch this video. (Please do not reverse the order.) This process may take half an hour or so, but I feel it will put you in the correct mood for democratic contemplation.

What is your goal in voting? Your goal in voting is to affect the real world in a real way. This is the same for any concerted collective action - eg, enlisting in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, writing letters to your congressman, going to Cuba to cut sugar cane, etc. Your logic is a matter of probability, not of plausibility. The tiny influence exerted by your action may, very improbably, sway some large-scale event in some meaningful direction.

Think of it literally as a sort of ethical calculus. You have some linear function G, normalized to the range (0 1), whose domain is a real, imaginary, or possible future state of any planet P. If you are choosing between politicians A and B, consider the possible future in which you voted for A, versus the possible future in which you voted for B, versus the future in which you didn't vote at all. Which is higher? G(Pa), G(Pb), or G(Pn)?

Distributed among all possible outcomes, these differences may be very small. But these small differences in probability nonetheless generate a slope, and you can vote by the slope.

In many elections, however, there is only one possible outcome. For example, it is clear that John McCain will win the Republican primary tomorrow. (Eg, a news blackout has already been imposed on his main competitor. These guys certainly don't play with Wiffle bats, do they, kids?)

Therefore, the probability that your vote will change the winner of the Republican primary tomorrow is trivial, because the official press's guess of the outcome is trustworthy. Not that its predictions are always reliable, but this kind of thing is what it eats for lunch.

Therefore, G(Pa) and G(Pn) are pretty much equivalent for McCain. If your only reason to vote is to support or oppose McCain, you need not vote.

But wait, you say. What about Kantian effects? Isn't my goal in voting to produce a result, not just by myself, but in concert with others? Lots of people joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Very few started their own Abraham Lincoln Brigade. It was Operation Venceremos, not Operation Venceré. And so on.

To a limited extent, yes: it may be appropriate to calculate G(Pa), G(Pb) and G(Pn), not just for your own decision to vote for A or B or not at all, but for the decision of everyone who is thinking like you. Moreover, whatever your beliefs may be, propagating them along with this neat little replicative package certainly helps them spread, at least if one of your vectors is the political system.

However, this logic cannot apply to tomorrow's election, because there is no way this meme can transmit itself virally before tomorrow. Most people believe that when you vote your goal is to compare G(Pa) versus G(Pb), where Pa is the planet on which A is President and Pb is the planet on which B is President. And if you don't really see any difference between Pa and Pb, you shouldn't bother. Obviously this is because they have not devoted any serious dental attention to the problem of how to vote. While hardly surprising, this hardly suggests that these same folks will both receive and transmit some new explanation of the problem.

Moreover, the people who know how the Republican election will come out tomorrow are the press. It is their business to know. It is essential to their continued existence in their present professions. They get it right. They keep a close eye on what the people think today, and today the people are for McCain. How they got that way is not of any concern to anyone.

And most important, for the Kantian theory of what people like you will do to work, their polls have to be wrong. If their polls are not wrong, it just means you are a major weirdo. Ergo: don't vote for McCain, not because McCain is evil or whatever, but just because voting for McCain is a waste of your own weird time. And so is voting for anyone else, if your only goal is to affect the winner of the primary.

Therefore, the only reason to vote in the Republican primary is to produce some nonelectoral consequence. Simply putting the opinions of a large number of motivated people on record has enormous relevance to our political system. Obviously, the capture of agencies by political minorities of every size, shape and trade is a major feature of Washington as it is today. So what if only 1% of Americans are Paulistas? While opposing the State is a very different thing from getting your gums on its tit, it never hurts to make any amount of muscle known.

This of course is the old "send a message" theory, which I endorse fully and will follow myself. Not everything here on UR needs to be surprising and new.

The problem in the Democratic primary is much more interesting. Your choice is between candidate H, who would stand out as colorful in the Brezhnev administration and is famous primarily for her devious bureaucratic ruthlessness, and candidate O, who comes to us as if born full-grown, like Aphrodite at Paphos, from the baths at Esalen, but is somewhat notable for his connections to racist gangsters and religious freaks, and is also the first American politician in over sixty years whose supporters sound exactly as if they were praying to Hitler. How can we even begin to react to this tasty smorgasbord?

We can begin by noting that, since the race is officially undecided, our votes may actually help determine the winner. Therefore, we must simply answer the default question: whose election is most likely to improve the world?

I would go with Obama, and here's why. First, the election of Obama makes the transformation of the President into the pontifex maximus of the Potomac much clearer. The Democrats are the party of the professional civil service. Under their administration, Washington basically runs itself. A world in which Obama does what he is obviously good at, delivering sermons, and does not pretend to be in some sense managing or governing, is a more honest world and thus a better one.

Second, as a good formalist I believe that power and responsibility should be as close to each other as possible. Ideally, they should be identical. I think that if you could turn the management of Washcorp over to the news desk of the New York Times, we would see a remarkable improvement in the quality of government. And probably in the quality of the Gray Lady as well. As Kipling put it, power without responsibility is the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages, and the Lady's knees are hardly smudgeless. If she offers us Barabbas, we should demand him. And Barack Obama is no Barabbas.

However, none of this answers the really important question, which is how we should vote in November. There may be no time for a proper viral campaign before tomorrow. But surely we can think of something clever for the general election.

My initial suggestion for 2008 is that, unless the election is actually close and perhaps even then, we write in David Petraeus for President and Steve Sailer for VP. These individuals are not running for anything, as far as I'm aware. And I'm sure they disagree on quite a few substantive points. But why let that stop us? Perhaps I'll elaborate more on the Petraeus-Sailer ticket in another post.

(Update: commenters have convinced me that Petraeus is not a good choice. While he is an actual winning general, a bizarre phenomenon whose like Plainland has not since MacArthur seen, he has spent a little too much time on campus. You wouldn't want another Eisenhower, and you wouldn't want to be seen as asking for one, either. So let's swap him out for an all-blogger ticket with Bill Whittle.)

32 Comments:

I bet 300 was less than 1% of the Spartans, and no Paulistas will actually be harmed during this phase. Besides if the war and the economy continue on their current paths, the next President may come to regret winning. Hitlery is already weeping...Pass the popcorn!

When I was reading the Charles Francis Adams speech and he was discussing the improvement of inferior races, I immediately thought of the section in Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks & White Liberals" where he discusses the Scottish and Japanese. Incidentally, I still wonder what you think of Indian (or "Hindostan" as CFA put it) independence and democracy. It also reminded me of the Levy & Peart piece I linked to a while back where Carlyle was placed on the side of the paternalists.

A Kantian is supposed to ignore the plausibility of anyone catching onto a viral meme and merely follow the Categorical Imperative. Voting one way because you think other people will also vote that way is just silly unless you think your vote can tip the balance. An individual vote doesn't even send much of a signal, though large scale boycotting often tars the result with an air of illegitimacy.

Electing Obama won't do a damn thing to formalize anything, and what makes you think he won't be involved in actual policy-making? He's a disciple of Saul Alinsky, not a philosopher or English professor.

Debbie fucking Schlussel? Man, the quality of links on this place is going downhill. I particularly liked, in that piece, how she tried to twist the fact that prominent AIPAC members are supporting Obama into some sort of proof that he practices evil Islamic mind control. Here's a corrective view.

However, this logic cannot apply to tomorrow's election, because there is no way this meme can transmit itself virally before tomorrowThis is quite a vulgarization of Kantian reasoning, even without the unwarranted assumption that people only started applying it when they heard about it from you. But since you hate Rawls I assume you are not a big Kant fan either.

It's interesting how you respond to one issue by moving to a different one.

Do you know what the factual debate on the "fundamentalist madrassa" boils down to? It boils down to the definition of "fundamentalist." In other words, it is not factual at all.

On a subject like this - let alone the easily checkable proposition that Obama's office employs Farrakhan people - why do you trust source A more than source B? I hope it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that A's graphic design is better.

See, for example, this on Obama's school. And note that in none of Schussel's own pieces does she describe Obama's school as a "radical Wahhabi madrassah" - though she quotes an article reportedly sourced from Hillary's camp as such.

Of course you receive Islamic indoctrination if you are a Muslim student in a government school in Indonesia. Half the people in Indonesia could be described as "Muslim fundamentalists." They could even be described as Wahhabi fundamentalists, because Saudi evangelism has been spreading Wahhabism far and wide for the last 30 years. The Beruki school was certainly not a Salafi madrassah, but I don't think anyone has accused it of anything such.

In other words, I fear you are engaging, I'm sure unconsciously, in the usual progressive pastime of ascribing guilt by association with strawmen. I am confident that you will have the decency to look into the matter at least as far as I did, and let me know if there's something I have missed here.

Here's my interpretation of this post: MM is a decent and wildly intelligent guy. As such, he can't not suggest Obama, who appears to be the most decent and intelligent candidate. Supporting Obama though is wildly incongruous with everything else he's written on this blog, so he had to come up with some sort of rationalization for it.

The Presidency of the United States is an anomaly because it combines the functions of head of state with those of head of government in a way that has been abandoned in just about all other parts of the civilised world. The President is in effect an elected king. This was not an unknown system of government at the time the Constitution was drafted. Venice had its doge, the Netherlands had their stadtholder, and in central Italy the pope ruled as a secular monarch in addition to being the vicar of Christ. However, as time has passed, other examples of elected kingship have fallen by the wayside, and only the U.S. president remains, like the last sad specimen of the passenger pigeon at the Cincinnati zoo.

Any historical study of kingship will reveal that monarchs always had a sacral role. The ceremonies by which a king of France was crowned were referred to as le sacre du roy, the consecration of the king rather than "coronation" as in English. The same term is used for the consecration of a bishop. The priestly element in the coronation of the English monarch survived the Protestant reformation.

As time has passed it is of course this ceremonial or sacral role that has been retained by the monarch, or by some substitute for him, such as the governors-general of Canada or Australia, the presidents of Germany or Italy, etc. Charles de Gaulle, in constituting the French Fifth Republic, attempted to reclaim authority for the presidency of France, but it takes strenuous work to retain that sort of authority and none of his successors has exercised as effectively as he did.

We see the same course of development being followed in the case of the U.S. presidency. It is striking how, as the pomp and circumstance that surrounds the office has increased, its actual ability to direct governance - rather than simply to influence it in tandem with many other competing sources of influence - has declined. The apogee of the imperial presidency can clearly be placed in the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt, who exercised real power in a way that none of his predecessors, save perhaps Lincoln, had done. The imperial trappings may have become more elaborate under his successors, but the imperial power is no longer in the personal possession of the president, so much as it is in the hands of a praetorian guard made up of appointed officials.

MM has been deservedly harsh in his criticism of democracy, but it seems to me that what we have in the United States more maintains its form than it contains its substance. This runs in odd parallel with the retention, even enlargement, of the ceremonial function of the presidency even as its actual power has been sapped. What we are left with in both cases is a sort of sham-dam institution. What makes them worthy of condemnation is in both cases their essentially deceitful character.

I wonder if we have paid proper attention to the role of neglect or abdication of responsibility in bringing about changes, not just in politics but in polity. The Roman republic fell because it could no longer contain the contention between it factions. Octavian stepped in, and because he was a shrewd operator, clothed the principate in a relatively modest dress, and carefully maintained the forms of the old republic, the Senate, consuls and tribunes, and so forth. His successors were less subtle and ultimately more foolish than he, but even so, some time elapsed before the citizens of Rome really understood that not just their politics, but their polity - their form of government - had been drastically and irreversibly altered.

The Merovingians, having spent their force in internecine conflict, lapsed - perhaps with relief - into the ceremonial side of their kingship, leaving the actual business of running the government to their mayors of the palace. This led to their soubriquet, les rois fainéants, and they persisted as such until one of their mayors of the palace decided he might as well bother with them no longer.

a study of English history reveals that the last monarch to cast the royal veto was the last of the Protestant Stuarts, Queen Anne. When she died, her successor was a man who could speak no English, the elector of Hanover. As George I he found it convenient to leave the day-to-day operation of his new kingdom to his servant, Sir Robert Walpole. His son, George II - another "stuffy old drone from the German hive" - followed the same course. By the time the ill-favored George III came to the throne, even though he spoke English perfectly well, he could no longer say "no" to Parliament or to his own ministers.

We have witnessed within our lifetimes the development of the perpetual political campaign. Sham-dam democracy rewards the successful campaigner, whose skills may not and probably do not include those of actual government. Such tasks are delegated to appointed commissions, which do most of the real work of a legislature by promulgating regulations and publishing them in the Federal Register. Thorny problems that no politicians want to address are punted to the appointed judiciary, which never has to face an electorate. When they decide one of them in a manner displeasing to a significant percentage of the population, the ceremonial government - Congress and the President - can then wring their hands in sympathy with the disaffected, and promise to do something if they can, but soon the discontent of the moment passes and the unpopular decree becomes settled law.

If we wish to see the further course of sham-dam democracy we have only to look at the European Union, which is several steps ahead of us down the descensus Averno. There we see how sovereign states have subordinated themselves, their elected parliaments and ministers, robed and bewigged judges and advocates, monarchs or other ceremonial heads of state - the whole kit and boodle - to the Beamtenherrschaft of Brussels, the scope and authority of which is limitless. Neither is any resistance to it ignored as de minimis, as witness the recent pro/persecution of a London street vendor for selling produce by pounds and ounces rather than by the kilogramme. Unless by some miracle the Bricker amendment should be revived, we have only to wait a while for such things to happen on this side of the Atlantic.

the election of Obama makes the transformation of the President into the pontifex maximus of the Potomac much clearer.

A Democrat is not necessarily going to be just a Pontifex Maximus, because they can actually expand the scope of the bureaucracy (and no Republican can turn it back).

A world in which Obama does what he is obviously good at, delivering sermons, and does not pretend to be in some sense managing or governing, is a more honest world and thus a better one.

In such a case, there will be an even greater dichotomy between the written Constitution and the way Washington actually works than there is now. How is that "more honest"?

Obama, who appears to be the most decent and intelligent candidate.

Say what now? There is nothing to choose between the four major candidates (Obama, Hillary, McCain, Romney) in terms of decency and intelligence. If those characteristics are the basis of your decision, you might as well roll 1d4 to decide who to vote for.

You and Schlussel are trying to tie Obama to questionable characters with questionable ideas. Since everyone is connected to everybody else, the issue is whether these ties are real, direct, and strong enough to let moral opprobrium flow through. This is not an objective question, of course. I found it amusing that she undermined her own effort by citing prominent Jewish supporters of Obama, both on the left and center-right. While it is possible that these people just haven't done due diligence, I find that a lot harder to believe than the proposition that Schlussel is just spewing garbage. Her graphic design is merely one element contributing to my impression that she is a journalistic bottom-feeder, several notches below Fox News and Matt Drudge, and that's pretty low. She's been pushing Obama as a dangerous Muslim for a year or so now, and hasn't gotten much traction among people I would bother paying attention to. Of course, maybe she's right and everybody else is wrong, but that's not the weightings my personal revipedia uses.

Believe me, I understand your desire to just tune out the whole right-wing noise machine.

I think the graphic design issue is actually quite telling. Look at Obama's design! It is literally 20 years ahead of any of the Republicans. Maybe even 30. Surely this is not an irrelevant point.

But my experience is that when I use the wisdom of crowds algorithm - surely the overwhelming majority of smart and thoughtful people in the US, like JA, are for Obama - to try to determine the credibility of sources, I get really bad results. My experience is that there are a lot of issues on which the people who are not smart and not thoughtful, and certainly do not have the best graphic design, are right while their fashionable opponents are wrong.

Given that this is exactly the result my eccentric theories predict (or at least postdict), I am inclined to treat it with respect. Which means that when I hear rumors such as "Obama is technically an apostate Muslim" or "John Kerry inflated his service record," I check them out.

Even if they come to me courtesy of said vast right-wing conspiracy. I don't consider Debbie Schlussel any more reliable than Salem Mohammed, or the people who brought us his uncropped Hamas candle shot. But I don't consider her any less reliable, either.

I find the best thing to remember about the vast right-wing conspiracy is that they're not stupid. If they find real dirt, they will purvey it unto us. Their graphic design may suck - it does suck - but this is a function mainly of their backward audience. They are generally capable of distinguishing between real and bogus dirt, and preferring the former. Generally where their credibility suffers is in the cases where there is no real dirt, and so they are forced to embroider. They are hardly alone in this vice.

In other words, I fear you are engaging, I'm sure unconsciously, in the usual progressive pastime of ascribing guilt by association with strawmen. I am confident that you will have the decency to look into the matter at least as far as I did, and let me know if there's something I have missed here.I'm not sure if this was addressed to me, but there aren't so many progressives passing the time here so I'm guessing it was. Who am I supposed to be ascribing guilt to? Debbie Schlussel? I didn't accuse her of anything, I just deemed her an unreliable and hysterical source. Aren't you the one ascribing guilt to Obama due to some rather loose connections to NOI and his childhood school? Projecting much?

As for the NOI staffer allegations, I did look into it to the extent of doing some Google searches, and could not find any corroborating stories from sources more reliable than Ms. Schlussel. So short of getting a journalism license and doing my own legwork, that leaves it down to personal judgements of trustworthiness. I imagine that as election season grind on, we'll see more stories like this, with more convincing sourcing if at all possible.

I'm somewhat surprised to see you pushing this stuff. Forget whether any of it is true or not. It seems to me that Obama is the epitome of your notion of Universalist (that video! he was president of Harvard Law Review!). Exploring that aspect of his character and his somewhat disturbing appeal seems interesting; desperate straining to try to paint him as a crypto-islamist does not, at least to me. You can't very well be both a Universalist and a fundamentalist.

We can begin by noting that, since the race is officially undecided, our votes may actually help determine the winner. Therefore, we must simply answer the default question: whose election is most likely to improve the world?

I really, really don't like this question. Improving the world isn't what's important unless you're a crypto-Universalist - improving the U.S. is what's important. Which are you, Mencius?

I would go with Obama, and here's why. First, the election of Obama makes the transformation of the President into the pontifex maximus of the Potomac much clearer. The Democrats are the party of the professional civil service. Under their administration, Washington basically runs itself. A world in which Obama does what he is obviously good at, delivering sermons, and does not pretend to be in some sense managing or governing, is a more honest world and thus a better one.

Again you're being a bit devious here. Your unstated assumption is that a more honest world (which is wrong, by the way; Obama will still pretend to be in control) will be a better one because your goal is to advance Cryptocalvanism to the point where people reject it. Dissolution of a meme that has succesfully replicated for hundreds of years will be extremely drawn out (look at Europe - is it going to fall apart tomorrow?) and painful, and potentially very, very destructive. I'm not sure if I would prefer to delay Crytocalvanism's march as long as possible or give it free reign. This post hasn't convinced me at all that the latter is preferable.

I haven't read much of his blog, but I don't see much special about Whittle. Could you link to the best (or just an especially good) post by him?

The Obama-muslim thing is pretty silly, Robert Spencer debunked it a long time ago, and he's the best the fear-the-islamic-hordes crowd has to offer. I dismissed guilt-by-association charges against him earlier, just as I did for Paul. Those sorts of things are for unserious people, like Jamie Kirchick. GNXP had a good discussion of the "apostate" angle here.

The Hitler reference didn't seem too terribly gratuitous in a country in which the mainstream, in its total ignorance of actual Nazi policies, feels that it simply must be the "opposite of Hitler" because they are "left" and he is "right". (Look at the way leftists have imagined a whole history in which the Nazis were in favor of IQ tests!) I genuinely believe a lot of people with just enough knowledge of history to be dangerous (i.e., very little; I mean "dangerous" in the classical sense in which it was thought, oddly enough, to be a bad thing) seek a leftist persona just to get away from the guy they say as the ultimate movie villain. It's odd that someone would pick socialism to try to set themselves apart from national socialism, but it's easy to say "Hitler wasn't a real socialist". I suppose his unsweetened porridge is how we know he's not a Scotsman.

How many American leftists could accurately identify the author of this quote: "[My movement] is is socialism in evolution, a socialism in everlasting change.... There is more that unites us with than divides us from bolshevism ... above all the genuine revolutionary mentality. I was always aware of this...."

Probably about as many as could identify which current Presidential candidate states flatly that he wants to create a Godly "kingdom on Earth".

Part of what may make the video moldbug linked to seem innocuous is that it is Americanized with music and puffy-lipped actresses. Just as benign ideas can seem dangerous to the masses when they wear Germanic clothing, dangerous eschatology can seem innocuous when sugary music is drizzled on it. Folks who aren't too Germanophobic or Amerophilic (not a good coinage, sorry) just aren't likely to see that video in the same light.

Obama isn't as bad as Hitler and I hope no one is saying that. I've known plenty of leftists, and underneath their guilt and liberation theology, they're generally good-hearted people to whom a clear sense of history just doesn't come naturally. The common-sense response to leftist thinking should always be faint praise ... When all is said and done, the American mainstream left isn't as bad as Hitler.

Obama? Mencius, have you Completely Lost Your Mind? A career politician that was a trial lawyer specializing in Civil Rights Extortion Rackets and Ambulance Chasing with other Lawyers seeking Scurrilous Injury Claims?

the election of Obama makes the transformation of the President into the pontifex maximus of the Potomac much clearerUh, this is the Democratic Party Candidate isn't it? The Separation of Church and State and School and Public Spaces Party having a Pontifex Maximus? Is Obama going to be the Pope of Atheists?

Quite frankly, I'm surprised that someone that no longer believes in Democracy would endorse anybody - but Obama? You have to realize that just the fact Obama is running is an invitation to Racial Violence and Race Riots right?

Let's face the fact that the color of his skin is the Only Reason he is still viable! His past is replete with disqualifiers that would have ENDED any other non-brown/black candidate in the first primary. Does anyone believe this guy would be a Senator or Presidential Wanna-Be if he had Embraced his Mother's Whiteness instead of the Dark Side of his Kenyan Father? Did he ever even know that guy?

Already the internet is abuzz with Veiled Racial Threats and Inane Give Me Money Civil Rights Hustlers talking about Reparations! If Obama loses the Nomination, then they riot. If Obama wins the Nomination, then they burn and loot. If Obama loses the Election, then they riot. If Obama wins, Crime Soars as Reparations Fever happens like it is in Zimbabwe or Johannesburg depending on whether you live in a Blue or Red State!

What the Hell kind of Salvation is this?! Pontifex Maximus my ASS! Even the Spanish Inquisition seems better than this guys religion - whatever that REALLY IS!